No Monsters And No Magic
by blueandblack
Summary: The Cullen family never came back to live in Forks, Washington. But Bella Swan did.


**Author's Notes**:

- HOLY CRAP I CAN'T BELIEVE I'VE FINISHED THIS. Seriously, it feels like I've been writing it _forever_, and I was starting to despair because it's just such a... monster. Lol.  
- It's for the 'Sort Of Beautiful' challenge here on fanfictiondotnet (http://wwwdotfanfictiondotnet/u/2046940), and I started writing back when I first got the email about that, so... long time. For me, anyway.  
- The challenge rules were that the fic had to be 'All Human' and contain the phrase 'sort of beautiful'. I'm fine on those two. The problem was the maximum word count was 7000 words, and this fic is nearly double that. And then there's the little matter of me taking forever to finish it and missing the cut-off date by a country mile. So on two counts, in terms of the contest, this is useless. But hopefully it will still be enjoyable to some.  
- A note to my friend HighViscosity - a) Where the hell is my sequel to 'Choosing The Right Story'? and b) There's a little nod to CtRS in this fic. It's teeny, but I'm sure you'll know the bit I mean...  
- Readers of 'If You Twist And Turn Away', I promise to get the fuck on with it.

* * *

The only thing Bella was leaving behind in Phoenix was the sun.

That was what she told herself as she boarded the plane, a smallish cabin bag in one hand, two suitcases in the belly of the beast, and twice the contents of them on a charity shop floor back in the city.

That was what she told herself because it was the truth.

After all, she didn't have friends. Not really.

Ever since Abby Lesten, her best and only _real_ friend, had grown up and gone away to college and gradually, haltingly, seemingly...

(She'd been four years older and tall and short-haired and sophisticated and Bella had met her on a hopeless quest for Proust in the high school library. Abby hadn't read _A Remembrance Of Things Past_, she was saving herself for the original French, and she told Bella she liked her and Bella didn't reply that she already adored her.)

... forgotten all about her, she'd decided that friends were sort of unnecessary, really.

And anyway, Bella and most girls... that just didn't work.

Guys were okay sometimes, until they started shuffling their feet and asking you to the spring dance. It was all downhill from there.

So there were no friends in Phoenix.

She liked school... but not _school_ exactly. Not that particular school in Phoenix. She liked the homework assignments, the stuff she did on her own and submitted to glowing, but disembodied praise, ticks in the margin and a nice, solid number on the back of the last page, that was really all she wanted.

Perhaps the teachers sensed that, because they tended to leave her to her alone. (On two report cards, fourth and fifth grades, she'd been described as 'unapproachable.')

There was school in Phoenix. But there would be school in Forks too.

Bella told herself the truth as she boarded the plane; that the house on Hunt street wasn't her home anymore, that her stuff had been scooped out of it days earlier, that her mother wasn't there waiting for her, poring over Brad and Angelina splashed mercilessly, mercifully all over the kitchen counter...

Renee wasn't on Hunt street.

She was somewhere in-between homes and so was Bella and the only thing she was leaving behind in Phoenix was the sun.

***

The way Bella saw it, she'd traded hot, dry and uneventful for cold, wet and uneventful.

Business as usual, plus one overcoat and a set of chains on the massive red truck her dad had bought her.

(Charlie was awesome. Awesome and awkward at the same time and it took Bella a year to decide it would be okay to love him the same way as she loved Renee. She was sure to pretend she already did while she made up her mind, so as not to hurt his feelings. She didn't know that and _he_ didn't know that he was doing the same.)

School was school. The kids in it were kids.

One thing that set them apart: they tended to have totally inappropriate beach parties on days when sane people would be curled up in bed with a good book, and it was at one of those beach parties that Bella met Jacob Black.

Well, 'met' probably isn't the right word, since he wasn't even Jacob Black to Bella that day, just 'the native kid who kept looking at me and squinting like I was a math problem'.

Two days later he tagged along on one of Billy's regular visits to Charlie and introduced himself with something cute and startling along the lines of "Hey, I'm the one who poured apple juice in your paint-box, sorry about that."

Bella had put two and two together already when she'd seen him helping his father out of the car, so she she wasn't as bewildered and intrigued as Jacob would have liked.

There was an awkward pause, followed by an even more awkward conversation about whether Bella should turn on the TV or not.

She did in the end and they sat on the couch and watched it, and Bella felt self-conscious and burdened and yearned for her bedroom and her books.

Jacob pieced her together is sidelong glimpses, wondered if she was a bitch or shy or both.

Silence, except for Billy and Charlie arguing in grunts and sighs over cards at the other end of the suddenly very small room.

Jacob tapped his fingers on the arm of the couch, yawned on purpose when Bella's dug into the leather.

More silence, peppered with 'Jacob and Bella: Scenes from childhood', a series of stories that Billy started to tell every now and then, and, thank God - or poker, really -, always forgot to finish.

He and Charlie were concentrating hard on their game, and Jacob and Bella were concentrating hard on a commercial for string cheese, and when it changed without warning to the newest model of some shiny, sliver automobile Bella couldn't care less about, Jacob sat forward like they'd just gotten to the good part, asked "Hey do you like cars?"

Bella could be unnervingly truthful when stressed or distracted, and right now she was a little of both. So she answered "No" and immediately felt like a jerk.

Jacob wasn't fazed though. In fact, she may as well have said "Yes, I love them so much, you have no idea", since Jacob's response was to ask her to drive them both over to his place on the reservation to hang out in his garage.

It would have been a lot more annoying if Billy hadn't been launching into a delightful little tale that Bella had heard once before, and once was most certainly enough. It involved her literally pissing herself when she'd been five and scared out of her mind during one of the campfire story-telling sessions Charlie really shouldn't have let her attend. Apparently Jacob had been just fine. "Three years old and grinning over ghosts and guts," Billy said, shaking his head with a fond smile. "But it was all too much for Bella wasn't it Charlie? And aw, the look on her little face when she..."

Bella grabbed her keys from the mantle, followed Jacob out the door.

"I'm building a rabbit," he said proudly once she'd caught up.

Bella opened the driver's side door, paused. "You're... building a rabbit?" she echoed, her mouth twisting as rather alarming and surreal visuals flooded her mind.

Jacob grinned and shook his head. "It's a type of car."

"Does it even look like a rabbit?"

"No."

"Does it even run on carrot juice?"

"I'm not going to dignify that with - "

"Too late."

***

When presented with the rabbit-in-progress Bella said it looked more like "a big car-shaped bowl with a whole lot of junk in it."

Jacob just snorted, nudged her easily and told her to give him a little time, someday she'd be laughing on the other side of her face.

And she was. Laughing that is.

Jacob was fun, and pretty soon Bella found herself deciding that one friend, as unnecessary as he may be, wouldn't hurt.

Especially since he was way too much of a kid to start asking her to the spring dance.

***

Not so Mike Newton. He asked Bella to go with him to exactly that in no time at all.

She managed to shut it down pretty skillfully with some bullshit about going to Seattle to visit a friend that weekend, but that little victory was somewhat hollow. Because Mike's next move was to ask her to prom instead, and through a concatenation of events involving ham-fisted subtlety from Charlie about how glad everyone was she was here, her mom guilt-tripping her with how guilty she felt about her little girl being all alone in a new town, and some weird reverse psychology tactics from Jessica Stanley that Bella still didn't get... she wound up saying yes to that.

To _prom._

And not only was prom _prom,_ but it was also freaking _months_ away, and that meant that Mike decided he needed to get to know his prom date in the meantime and prom date turned into _dates_ and then...

Bella had a boyfriend.

Pretty soon and pretty strangely, Bella had a boyfriend and a friend who was a boy, and she never saw the need to mention one to the other until they... met. In about as broad a sense as Bella had 'met' Jacob that first day on the beach.

***

It was a Saturday afternoon and Mike and the others were going to the movies to see the latest slasher flick. Bella didn't want to go. The idea bored the crap out of her, and besides, Jake was getting a new part for the rabbit that weekend, and okay so that bored the crap out of her too, but at least she wouldn't have to put on shiny shoes and lip-gloss and have it kissed off in the dark under the constant-surreptitious gaze of Jessica Stanley.

So Bella told a fib. She hated to tell fibs. In her grander moments she liked to think that truth defined her, and really let's face it, fibs were lies, little lies but lies all the same but...

But she was tired that day, and probably PMS-ing or something, so she lied and said she hadn't turned in the English paper that had been due on Friday, she'd had cramps so she'd gotten an extension and she really needed to make it good and...

Mike had smiled, she'd heard it over the phone. She'd told him to go without her and tell her all about it at lunch the next day in Port Angeles (that date had been set in stone two weeks back).

It had been easy. A little lie and poof, no slasher flick.

It had been _too _easy, Bella decided, and for a moment she thought how she did actually have a paper due next week, History not English, but still, she had a paper due and she did want it to be good and maybe she should just work on that...

But she didn't. She went searching for parts with Jake instead, and had such a nice afternoon that she forgot to feel guilty about the little lie.

That is until Mike and co passed them on the road.

"Whoa, what bit you on the ass?" Jacob said, when she shot up in the air and reflexively sank down in her seat.

The car slowed as it passed by, and Jessica leaned over and honked the horn.

Jacob waved cheerfully, and when they were gone, he asked if they were Bella's friends and what her problem was.

Bella sighed, pressed down on the accelerator, having come almost to a complete stop in the middle of the road.

"The guy behind the wheel is my boyfriend," she muttered.

Jacob didn't say much while she drove him home, and in the quiet Bella was thinking _Shit! Shit. Well that's it. That's the end of the boyfriend thing, right there. _

***

Except it wasn't, not in and of itself. She met Mike for lunch the next day as planned and found that he was actually pretty chill about it. She shouldn't have been so surprised really, because the only thing Mike had ever not been chill about was the spring dance/prom business - once they'd officially started dating, he'd ceased to be a source of stress in her life, and she'd decided she actually liked him quite a lot. She just didn't necessarily want to spend every waking moment with him.

But she didn't necessarily want to be dumped by her first boyfriend either, and that was precisely what she was expecting, so she was surprised when he bought her halting story about Charlie asking her to drive his friend's kid to Port Angeles to pick something up for his car. It was all true, except for the bit about Charlie asking. And Mike might have assumed "his car" meant the cruiser, but it was his business if wanted to jump to conclusions, Bella decided.

The truth was that Mike didn't buy the story, or he wasn't entirely sure that he did, but he pretended to, because he was pretty much crazy about Bella and prom was coming up, and he'd gotten a good look at that Native kid and had quickly decided there was no reason to be threatened by chubby cheeks and girl-hair.

So it wasn't the end of the boyfriend thing. But it was the beginning of the end. Without meaning to be or knowing it, Mike became more and more possessive in the months that followed, and Bella got more and more stressed out by it.

They slept together at prom - both of their first times - and again after that on three or four separate and sweet occasions, but in the back of Bella's mind she was thinking, with guilt-marred relief, that it wouldn't be long before college would separate them and that would be that.

Only it didn't work out quite that way, and the day Mike said they should discuss which colleges they were going to apply to and seasoned his sentences heavily with the word 'we', Bella was forced into the most unpleasant task of her short life. She actually had to break up with him.

It was awful. And it was why the one and a half relationships she went on to have in her first year of college were really just flings.

***

Her first year of college didn't happen right away, though. Bella had been accepted into Dartmouth, but had missed out by what she was sure was a ridiculously small margin on being awarded a partial scholarship. She had gotten one to Washington State, and for a while she'd considered taking it, but Bella had always been determined by nature, and at the end of the day she was not interested in second best, not when it came to Academia.

It was Dartmouth or bust.

So she turned down the scholarship (Jessica sniped to Mike that it was really conceited of her and Mike was suitably consoled), spent her first year out of high-school working ten hour shifts in a grocery store in Port Angeles, upgraded to eight hour shifts in a bookstore halfway through.

It wasn't exactly pleasant or exciting and it _was_ exhausting; In her time off Bella did very little but lie on an old couch she'd made Jacob drag into the garage, fill out quizzes in magazines she couldn't be less interested in while she tried to work out which animal she was going to name the newest wreck after.

It was a year of drudgery and comfort and by the time she was signing up online for a dorm room, Bella was desperate to get out of the state.

There wasn't much she would miss.

There was her dad of course, but that was a given so it didn't really count.

Other than that... the debacle with Mike had kind of segregated her from her not-quite-friends, even if Angela Weber was still always really sweet. And anyway, they'd all gone off to college the year before.

Jake was still in school. She would miss him, and she'd decided to do her very best not to seemingly forget all about him, even if she doubted she'd make it back to Washington before next summer.

She would miss Jake, of course, but that was a given so it didn't really count.

***

Jake wasn't all that good with the technology stuff, so it was a struggle trying to maintain an email correspondence with him. They talked on the phone though, at least twice a week and usually for long periods. And usually about absolutely nothing of interest.

One time they made it to six hours straight. The last fifteen minutes were kind of a cheat, seeing as they were spent yawning into the receiver, with Bella occasionally complaining about how badly she needed to pee. But they'd decided it would just be perverse not to hang in there for the full six when they were so close. (Jacob was disappointed to find that they were nowhere near to making it into the Guinness Book of Records anyway.)

Bella liked college. There she found not one but two professors from whom a number on the last page of her paper was not enough. She pored over their words, squinting at the messy backhand of one in the margins, reading and rereading the somewhat anal printing of the other, secretly wishing she could record any scraps of conversation she had with them, or at least take notes.

It was from one of these most revered professors that she got her first C. Okay a C+ but really at the end of the day it was still a C and it was one of the times Bella really missed Jake, in that small, ashamed, warm-soda-actually-tastes-good way.

She called him and Billy said he was out, she called his cell phone and he didn't pick up. That wasn't unusual. She wasn't worried. She was just painfully lonely suddenly, and it seemed like nobody around her could say the right thing. The awful truth about the C was either met with laughter and _The number of times I flunked out of such and such_ and how she really shouldn't give a shit about it, or it was met with a solemn face and a shoulder squeeze, an unhelpful reminder that it wasn't too late to change her major.

When she finally did get a hold of Jacob, he tried saying versions of both of these things and a whole range in between until Bella said she thought he was probably right about one of them.

She felt much better.

***

It had been a whole year since Bella had set foot on Washington soil. More than, actually, since she'd left early for college to get settled in, and had taken a vacation with her mom in Florida for the past month or so.

She was excited to be home, pleasantly surprised to find that that was how she thought of Charlie's place; as home.

She was a day early, and the idea was to surprise Charlie by showing up on his doorstep just like that, so she took a slow bus all the way from Seattle, a fast but _expensive_ cab from the station in Forks, and by the end of it all she was cross and a little sweaty and not entirely sure it had been worth the effort.

But Charlie was wide-eyed and stoically thrilled when he saw her, and she smiled, dropped her bags, reached out and hugged him. Billy was there too, and when he wheeled himself into the hallway it became a weird, lop-sided group hug and Billy and Bella laughed, Charlie grunted.

He didn't have a thing in the house; he'd been planning to do the grocery shopping in the morning before she arrived. As it was there was beer or there was... beer. A whole lot of vitamin R and some empty pizza boxes.

Bella sighed, scolded, fished around for the keys to the truck and said she'd pick some stuff up from the store, maybe stop by and see Jake if he was home.

Billy said he was.

***

Billy had told Bella that Jake was holed up working on some paper for extra credit in some class he was supposed to be done with already but he was sure he'd be very happy to see her.

He'd told her to just take the key under the old urn round the side and go straight in, since Jake would probably have music playing and the volume up to ear-splitting levels and how that helped anybody study he didn't know but maybe that was why he was still writing papers for the class he was supposed to be done with already.

Except he wasn't.

There was a girl. On Jacob's bed. Wearing... nothing. Or possibly panties, Bella didn't look long enough to be sure.

But she was sure that her back was bare and it was arched, and she was whispering something, and Jacob...

Jacob was crawling over her, this possibly-panties girl, and he was naked from the waist up, dark and long but sort of tight and... smooth and... naked from the waist up and from the waist down his jeans were undone and they dragged low over his hip bones and just as Bella walked in, in less time than it took for her to absorb what was before her eyes, she heard him, his cosy, familiar voice, _Jacob Black's voice,_ answering the whispers with "Yeah? You want me to fuck you?"

She breathed in and out at the same time, stepped back, out of the room, out of the house.

***

She wanted to cry.

Bella wasn't usually big on crying but right now she really wanted to because she was just so... _humiliated._

She closed her mouth against sobs, her eyes against tears, and walked briskly and blindly toward her truck.

Except Bella's sense of direction sucked even when she was looking where she was going.

She'd gone the wrong way, slightly to the left, and walked a few too many feet past her truck down toward the beach, and by the time she thought about it, opened her eyes and rubbed quickly at them, by the time she turned around and looked back at the house, she saw Jacob in the doorway, pulling a shirt over his head and scanning the front yard till he spotted her.

She gulped, shook her head, and literally ran away from him.

***

Bella didn't run long. She was probably even less big on running than she was on crying.

But she did walk a fair way down the beach, a long enough distance to have tired her out and left her pretty calm by the time Jacob found her, sitting by an old bleached tree trunk, running sand between her fingers.

"What are you doing?" she asked as he approached.

Jacob shrugged, then smiled broadly and said "You're home early!"

Bella rolled her eyes, muttered "Surprise."

Jacob just chuckled and sat down beside her and when he did so she tried to ignore a sudden, very foreign urge to inch away from him.

"Really though, what are you doing here?" she asked, as though she were mostly uninterested and a little irritated, "I mean, she's not... you didn't just leave her..."

"No, no. She left already - almost as quickly as you did." He nudged her leg with his and Bella tried not to flinch, failed a second later when he added "You kind of killed the mood, Bells."

She willed herself not to start crying again, said "I'm sorry."

Jacob grinned at the miserable sincerity of her apology. "It's cool, she was just a little embarrassed is all."

"What?" Bella asked distractedly, her fingers searching the sand. "She shouldn't be the one... I mean..." She shook her head, looked up at Jacob again. "I'm the idiot who just barged in there without even knocking. I'm the one who should be embarrassed, not her."

"See now that's what I said!"

"Oh thanks."

After that they were quiet for a moment.

Jacob was thinking how he was happy Bella was home and wondering whether it was too soon to drag her into the garage to check out his progress on the giraffe. He might even be able to get it finished while she was here and then they could take it for a drive to Seattle and...

Bella was thinking how this had to be the most awkward silence they'd experienced since that first afternoon in Charlie's living room, and there wasn't even a damn TV for her to turn on.

Finally she decided that it would be better to just break the damn silence, because this was hopeless, there was no sense sitting around like this trying to pretend they weren't both still thinking about what had happened with...

"What's her name?" she asked, deciding she really shouldn't be thinking of Jake's girlfriend as Possibly-Panties.

Jake frowned. "You're still obsessing over that?"

"Still? It's been a half-hour," Bella huffed. Sometimes it really did piss her off how stuff just... rolled off Jacob's back.

_Stupid duck. That's what I'll call the next car. A stupid duck. _

"Anyway I wasn't obsessing, I was just asking what her name was."

"Ellie," Jacob told her.

"She seems nice," Bella said quickly. With a straight face.

Jacob laughed heartily and she didn't bother to pretend she didn't get what was funny.

"Why didn't you tell me you had a girlfriend?" she asked when he was done. "I mean, wow. You're really all growed up, huh?"

He shrugged. "Why didn't you tell me about the Newtonator? Anyway, it's not that serious."

"Oh but... okay."

Jacob grinned. "Man, you look so confused."

"Right." Bella breathed in, wrapped her arms around her body. "I mean, it's just... it's not that serious, but the two of you do..."

She left it hanging there and averted her eyes and Jacob would have been in hysterics again if he hadn't been holding back for her sake. He compromised with a small smile and a painfully direct "We have sex."

"Okay," Bella squeaked.

That did it. Jake was laughing again. "Ah Bella," he said between puffs of mirth. "Good to see college hasn't corrupted you. I bet you haven't even been to a single frat party, have you?"

Bella was still a little flustered from the whole Jacob-has-casual-sex thing, tried to hide it by standing up and brushing the sand from her jeans, heading back toward the house. "I've been... I've done lots of... stuff."

Jacob followed with a dry "Sure, sure."

Bella smiled at her feet, said sternly, "Hey, don't you go forgetting who the grown-up is in this relationship."

"_Right,_ you've had a couple of extra years reading novels about dudes in frilly shirts. I defer to your experience, my lady."

When she laughed at the ridiculous tone of his voice, at the flourish his hand made, Jacob decided it was time for hugs.

He swept her easily into his arms, said "Welcome home honey," and Bella thought how tall he'd gotten, how he was at least six feet, probably a little more, and then...

Nothing. There were no sentences forming in her mind. There was no movement in her body. It was like she was frozen.

Except not cold. Hot, actually. And sort of... prickling.

It was unpleasant, maybe. It was...

It was a short hug by Jacob's standards, a long one by Bella's.

Average. Maybe five seconds. One one hundred, two one hundred...

Bella would remember later that her eyes had closed at some point, that half her left cheek had pressed against cotton, the other half against skin, that at some point all the air inside her had gotten trapped inside some small strip of lung, thrown itself around like insects on glass...

She would think of the hug as different from the hundreds that had come before it, even though in truth it had been substantially the same. She could swear Jacob's hand had never rested right _there_, right at that precise point where her spine tapered away into...

And he was never this close, he'd never been this close or he'd never said things before... Well, he _had,_ but he _couldn't have,_ because Bella had never heard _honey_ with her skin, felt words touching in hot, jagged lines from her jaw to the middle of her ribs and down, down...

And she was sure, she was _certain_ that she had never felt his fingers slip under her hair on three one hundred, four one hundred, she had never ever felt Jacob press his body against hers like this and she had never ever felt him stroke along the nape of her neck like a lazy wind over the Arizona desert...

Five.

One hundred.

This hug was completely different...

...wasn't it?

***

Bella went home pretty shortly after checking out the giraffe with the best soft-edged sarcasm she could muster.

She said she was tired from the flight and Jacob pouted impressively, but it only made her want to get out of there more, because she found she couldn't stop staring at his lips and thinking how they were sort of... different.

She told him he didn't really have a right to be disappointed since he hadn't been expecting her till the next day anyway.

"Right," Jacob said as he shut the truck's driver's side door. He backed away, grinned, waved, mouthed "Surprise."

***

It was a surprise when Bella had trouble sleeping that night, because she _was_ tired from the flight, and why the hell was she clutching her pillow and staring into the darkness at an imaginary Jacob who was ducking his head and smiling at her?

Why, when she lay on her back to escape that vision, did she find another, why did she see in the darkness another imaginary Jacob, one who was crawling from the foot of the bed toward her, and his eyes were dark and too alert, and the muscles in his shoulders rolled like -

Bella thrashed her way onto her side again, kicked the covers off her body in her fervor, pulled them back up because it was cold and she was angry.

_Ugh. Why?_

Why was she thinking about the different hug and wondering how long it would be until that happened again, when of course it would be soon enough, hugs were always soon enough with Jacob...

She sighed, decided that if she focussed all of her attention on something else she might be able to force the thoughts out of her mind long enough to fall asleep and forget about everything for a while.

She pulled her dog-eared copy of _Romeo and Juliet_ out of her book bag, read a little and threw it across the room because she was sick to death of it, pulled out _The End Of The Affair_, which was on her reading list for next semester and was _fantastic,_ but Bendrix and Sarah still got thrown into a heap with the other doomed lovers.

Bella lay on her stomach, pressed her face into the mattress and saw nothing.

She saw nothing and still she thought about Jacob.

Or more precisely, and more upsettingly, she thought about _touching_ Jacob.

***

She was still thinking about touching Jacob the next day and was thoroughly dissatisfied with the hasty hug she got when she showed up at his place.

He started telling her about a bargain he'd scored last night, took her hand and towed her eagerly toward the garage, and she kept wanting to cover his hand with her free one, she kept wanting to yank the one he was holding away...

She was being ridiculous, she knew it.

They'd always held hands, randomly and sporadically.

And they'd always sat close on the old couch like this, like they were doing right now as he pulled out a dusty manual and explained how most of an engine he'd got for half price was going to turn the giraffe into a _real_ beast, they'd always sat close like this, thighs and shoulders up against each other.

They'd always hugged tightly and longer than most, there was nothing different about it, Bella realized and...

And it had been _fine._ It had been nice.

It had been... Jake and Bells.

Now it was unsettling. It made her flesh crawl. It made her shiver.

Jacob had finished with the automotive exposition, was now searching for some photos he had from Quil's eighteenth and telling her what she was sure was a very amusing story about the same event, and she was thinking about touching him again.

She _wanted_ to touch him. And then she was terrified of touching him, because it was so weird now, it was so _embarrassing,_ because of the bedroom incident, she told herself, it was embarrassing because she'd seen him doing things she never, ever wanted to imagine little Jacob Black doing.

_Ugh, pass the brain-bleach, please. _

She shook her head when he wasn't looking. She was being ridiculous, she was, and she couldn't help it one bit.

Bella looked cautiously at Jacob as he rummaged around in drawers and thought how she wanted to touch him and she wanted to touch him _all the time._ Or really, she wanted him to touch her all the time. Right now, for whatever stupid reason, her touching him was sort of like low-fat yoghurt, or maybe something like nicotine patches were for ex-smokers (Her roomie Maureen said they're like "having a smoke and wanting a damn smoke the whole time".)

The day was awful and she was wondering how long it was going to be before she got over this crap, before her brain processed the offending visual and moved on.

Soon, she hoped, because she had been looking forward to this. She'd been looking forward to coming home and hanging out like old times and now, thanks to Miss Possibly-Panties, or _Ellie, sorry,_ it was all just ruined.

***

It didn't go away. Or it hadn't, to date.

And it had been a week of awful for Bella.

So much so that she had even tried not going over to Jacob's one day to see if that would help matters. She'd made up some stuff that might have actually been true about wanting to spring clean Charlie's place, and Jacob had pouted again (over the phone, he'd had to tell her), but he'd said okay, fine, fair enough, he'd kind of been neglecting his other friends anyway.

That thought had followed Bella from room to room.

_His other friends. That still means Quil and Embry... right?_

She'd wound up at his place by midday, found he wasn't around, and decided that not going over to Jacob's hadn't helped matters.

Nothing was helping matters. Not staying away, not forcing herself to smile and nudge him and be cool. Not cluttering her mind with detail, not giving in and letting herself imagine it: her, her_self_, under him, _Jake,_ and the color of his skin, and the _words..._

Nothing was helping.

***

Bella didn't wear tops like this. The small, form-fitting ones, that were low at the front and suspended by little shoe-string straps.

Well, that wasn't strictly true. She had worn them, back in Phoenix, often, and occasionally during her stay in Florida, but here in Washington there was hardly ever enough sun to warrant it, and Bella was the type for whom this much bare skin had to be warranted.

And right now it was. Bella decided it was completely warranted, because it was high summer, and okay so it was a little overcast and the garage was musty and sort of cool the way it always was and an ordinary teeshirt would have done just fine...

She shrugged out of the check shirt she was wearing and threw it on the old couch, tossed her hair back the way girls on TV did and immediately felt stupid.

Luckily, Jacob wasn't looking her way.

_Luckily._

Bella's eyes narrowed, she bit her lip.

Jacob leaned further over the car, reached back blindly for a screwdriver or... something else...

It didn't matter. The point was that when he did so his teeshirt pulled itself lightly up and up, and for a second it was well away from the waistband of his jeans, which, really, they should just start calling it a hipband, and Bella suddenly felt totally indecent in her new camisole, which may or may not have been a size smaller than all the others she owned, just barely shushed the voice in her head that was nagging at her to retrieve the shirt and be done with all this.

She stepped forward, leaned over the car next to him, caught sight briefly of her own cleavage as she did so, blinked, breathed, asked what that was he was pulling at, blinked, breathed again.

Jacob smiled, she saw him peripherally, and she was pretty sure he saw her peripherally and his next sentence started with "Uh...", finished with his hand in his hair.

"What is it?" Bella asked again, like it mattered to her to know.

She braced herself on both hands against the car, rested her chin on one high shoulder and caught Jake's eye like it was an accident. He tilted his head like it was a question, ran his hand through his hair again.

"It's a camshaft," he said finally, and then a whole lot of other stuff Bella nodded along to. He finished with "... I don't know why it's taking so long, it should be easy," and as he turned, as one eyebrow rose, "That's what the old guy said. 'A real bargain, son. Half what a garage will charge you and easy as breathing'." He rolled his eyes, muttered "Please."

"Well maybe you should just keep trying," Bella said quickly, and for no good reason almost lunged over the hood at the something... shaft. She pushed past Jacob as she did so, tripped over his foot, banged her shin hard, he grabbed her waist and _then_ she winced.

There was a beat before Jacob laughed, asked her if all her bones were pointing the right way, and Bella realized she was trapped between the car and his body.

She wanted to bolt out of the garage. She wanted to close her eyes and stay right where she was.

"I'm fine."

She hadn't meant it to be a whisper, but that was how it came out. She hadn't meant to add "Jake...", but there it was, lingering between them in the same breathy tone. She hadn't meant to lean back so far and so heavily, but she had, she did, she was...

The back of her whole body was pressed against the front of a whole lot of his, and somewhere along the line the hand that had been at her hip to steady her had moved to her stomach to...

Jacob's hand was _under her shirt,_ and Bella wasn't sure what its purpose was anymore.

She swallowed, wondered how the hell that had happened, how the hell...

He was saying something. He was whispering too.

"Are you sure?"

It was a short sentence, but it seemed long. It seemed like it was broken up, like it was coming from several places at once, and Bella was confused. She shook her head, pressed the lower half of her body back, felt the hand at her stomach follow suit, felt a light heat leap from her chest to the top of her head because she was trapped between the car and his body, she was trapped between his hand and his hips.

She closed her eyes, stayed right where she was.

They were both quiet, and it was as though they were both concentrating very hard on something they were entirely unaware of.

Jacob's hand was pressed flat against Bella's stomach, and after a few seconds that nobody counted, the pads of his fingers and thumb began to move back and forth, slower when he breathed in, a little too fast the other way, and Bella rested her head against his chest and whispered _"Jake..."_

It seemed like a sign when the button on her jeans slipped out of its hole like a drop of water trickles down a window pane. Jacob decided that whether he'd been pulling at it or not, it still seemed like a sign. It seemed like a good reason to keep going.

And for Bella, too, it was a sign, it was a reason to keep going, to keep going with... standing still, to do nothing but breathe when the zipper slid down with Jacob's hand, when it yielded just as surreally easily as the button before it, when his thumb ran under the elastic at the top of her underwear, when the rest of his fingers dove quickly, completely, confidently, straight to the...

He was touching her.

Jacob was touching her and Bella felt like her lungs were going to burst, but they didn't, nothing burst, nothing stopped, and then it started again, and over and over, he just kept on touching her and she kept on breathing even though it seemed impossible, even though it seemed more and more impossible with every second she didn't count that nothing was going to... burst...

Bella stood, or leaned, or half-in-half, and silence rushed past her with everything else, and when Jacob spoke it was a wave, a roaring softness, unreasonably amplified and at the same time faraway.

"Oh _honey_... I always knew you'd wind up wanting me. But I never knew how _bad..._"

Bella felt her eyes widen under closed lids, her mouth fell open and she thought maybe she had something to say but nothing came out and maybe it didn't matter anyway, because Jacob was talking again, and still, still, he was still moving, and as she pressed herself against him she realized there were circles on both sides of her, slow mirrors and clock-faces, hips and fingertips.

"It's nice..."

He said it on an inhalation, exhaled with another slow slip of his fingers.

Then twice more, three times, four, he moved rough-slick against her, and Bella _seriously couldn't breathe_ by the time he whispered "It's nice to know", turned her chin up toward his with the hand that wasn't otherwise occupied.

He kissed her. Slowly and simply, a soft almost-parting of her lips.

And at the same time he pulled his hand out of her pants.

Bella swallowed, stared at the ground, thought how that - the kiss-withdrawal, she named it - had been gentle and brutal at the same time, how it had reminded her of the soothing distraction a mother gives a child right when she's about to remove a splinter, or the way a doctor says 'this won't hurt a bit' just as the needle pierces your skin, and when she turned to see Jacob backing toward the workbench with his fingers in his mouth, she nearly stumbled standing still.

"What do you want me to do?"

The words came out of nowhere. Bella hadn't seen Jacob's lips move, even though she'd been staring at them.

She waited, blinked twice while blood beat around her body and all she could hear was her own heartbeat, heavy and hot in her ears, Bella waited and wondered whether this was really happening, whether this was really her, whether she was really going to say...

"I want you to fuck me."

She felt her head tilt numbly, her eyebrows raise.

She thought _That was strange,_ and it was, and so was the next part.

Jacob pulled his shirt over his head, just like that, and advanced on her, _just like that, of course,_ and then he was kissing her so suddenly, and so _completely_, and Bella felt she really should have had more of a warning about all of this.

But there were no more warnings.

The hood was down and Bella was on it but she slid back down to the ground pretty soon, because Jacob stopped kissing her, turned and walked a few quick paces, told her to take her pants off.

So she slid down till her feet hit the ground again, took her pants off like he'd asked her to pass him a soda, and when he turned back around he was _entirely naked _and holy _crow,_ Bella had been sort of out of it when she'd had sex with Aaron, and Mike had taken care of the whole condom issue under the sheets and...

She was staring.

Jacob _loved_ it.

He strolled forward as casually as he could manage, like he wasn't naked and hard and starting to wonder if this was all a figment of his imagination, and Bella's throat hitched hotly, she looked down, saw her own bare thighs and was grateful for her panties, _definitely-panties,_ she thought.

Only Jacob was laughing at her and taking them away.

"I meant pants plural," he said, with a grin against her stomach and up to her eyes. "We won't get very far with these on."

***

It was over quickly for Bella.

Or maybe it hadn't been quick. Maybe it had been _slow_, because really the whole week had felt like some kind of cruel, coiling foreplay and now finally, finally...

It was all spilt. It was all cut loose. It was over.

She was barely aware of the sweated metal shifting at her back.

She was barely aware Jacob moving above her, inside of her, over and over, of the subtle fizz of his lips at her neck and the words... something like "Wait, wait..."

And then he was still, entirely still except for his chest which drew back and fell forth into Bella's, over and over, and Bella was entirely still except for her right leg shaking at his hip, her left foot barely trembling along his thigh.

If their minds had been up to the task they would both have thought of themselves as peaceful in the two or three minutes that followed.

***

It didn't last.

By the time Jacob had helped Bella's still-trembling legs make it back into her jeans, zipped and buttoned for her, by the time she had pulled the indecent camisole up over her breasts and slid the straps back over her shoulders, by the time she was clothed and Jacob had turned to retrieve his pants, Bella was wound tight again and she was asking "What are you going to tell Ellie?"

Jake shrugged, pulled his shirt on. "Nothing, probably. It's not that serious."

Bella knew what he meant. Deep down she knew he meant Ellie and not her, but somehow she was feeling splayed out, split up, spilt and cut loose and willfully insecure.

So she shrugged, just like he had, retrieved her check shirt, put it on, straightened the sleeves.

Jacob watched her and said "I did have a date with this other girl this Friday though. I guess I should cancel that?"

Bella shrugged again. Jacob raised an eyebrow.

"I don't..." she said, looking around busily for her flip-flops. "I mean, whatever you feel comfortable with is fine. Whatever."

"Okay."

Bella took an involuntary step back, stepped right onto her shoes, picked them up and smiled brightly.

"Okay," Jacob said again, and Bella stepped back again, stumbled even though she hadn't stepped on anything this time, clung quickly to "_Okay._ Well I probably won't tell Jamie anything either," for balance.

"Jamie? Who the fuck is Jamie?"

She smiled thinly, dropped the flip-flops and slid into them. "This guy I'm sort of seeing at Dartmouth." (Sort of seeing meant Maureen had said that Leanne had said that Jamie's roomie had said that Jamie was probably going to ask Bella out for coffee one of these days.) "He's really into Proust, amazing conversationalist." (It wasn't true, Jamie was into Kafka, and he kept most of the clever thoughts he had to himself.)

"Right. Conversation. Let's hope that's not all he's good at."

Bella shot back "I'm sure it's not," before she had time to take in the sullen tone of Jacob's voice, and he was saying "_Sure_ sure," before he could enjoy the defensiveness in hers.

"Well I'll let you know. I mean, it's not like we've slept together yet." Bella cocked her head to one side, an unnecessary accompaniment to what was to come. "He's the classy type."

"Wow. Ouch," Jacob said, like it hadn't hurt him one little bit. Only it had. A little. Or it had surprised him at least. He wasn't used to Bella being a bitch, not to anyone and least of all to him.

"Sorry," she muttered, in an especially petulant way she would cringe at later.

He shrugged, turned on the radio and turned his back to her.

She left.

***

Jacob was pretty damn upset about what had just happened.

Bad love songs blared at an obnoxious decibel and for a moment he eyed the beads of condensation on the hood of the giraffe, the soft, wet patterns Bella's body had left behind.

He turned the radio off, grabbed the old pair of shorts he used as a rag, wiped quickly at the paint-work, shoved the hood up, worked angrily and fruitlessly.

He was pretty damn upset about the whole thing.

But about twenty minutes after Bella had left he shook his head, rolled his eyes, decided that he would get over it, probably, and he'd probably call her tomorrow and tell her to get over it too and come over and hang out.

***

Bella was sore. Literally and figuratively.

She had a bruise, or more of a _burn_, along her spine, and one on her coccyx, from where she'd been... (she closed her eyes just to think it)... pressed repeatedly against the hood of the car, and wait a minute, for the love of God, why hadn't they at least done it on the couch?

She was pissed off about the bruises and she was pissed off about everything else too.

That was what she would have said if anyone had asked her what had made her so angry.

"_Everything!!!!!!!"_

Only since she barely left the house over the next few days and Charlie generally avoided conversations that opened with 'What's wrong?' at all costs, she never got the chance to scream that at anyone.

Instead she repressed. And cooked. And watched TV. And stared at the pages of books.

(And was bored and miserable and just a little sorer for every day that Jacob didn't call.)

It was strange and painful, all this waiting she'd been doing lately, for Bella it was sort of like... maybe the opposite of déjà vu, because she felt like this was all familiar but all the wrong way around.

She couldn't help feeling like really _she_ should be the one not-calling and... okay so technically she was not calling him but...

She couldn't help feeling like for some reason Jacob should be running around after her, like for some reason he should be the one wringing his hands and hoping and hurting and waiting for something that never came...

She knew she was silly to feel that way. Sure, he'd had a crush on her back when they'd first met, Bella couldn't pretend she'd been oblivious to that. But she'd been different then. She'd been that precise mixture of older-and-wiser and shiny-and-new that had had been tricking teenage boys into thinking they were in love for centuries, and Jacob... he'd been different too.

Fourteen and a half and... different.

Bella had decided there were ways in which Jacob was very different now, and she reminded herself that whatever he'd felt for her back then had been a crush, that it had been just-a-crush and he had been just-a-kid...

And then they'd become friends, she remembered, with a helpless exhalation and sad arms folding around her body. _Best_ friends, even if they didn't braid each other's hair.

(Actually they had done that once. Jacob's braid had been longer. Bella's had been prettier though, he was always so good with his hands...)

They'd become best friends. And now they were best friends who'd fucked - Bella cringed at the word, at the memory of it falling unchecked from her own lips...

Now they were best friends who'd fucked on the hood of a car.

She didn't know how to be that.

So she repressed. And cooked. And watched TV. And stared at the pages of books.

***

Bella didn't call back.

Jacob decided that either meant she actually, really, seriously didn't want to see him, or she was just trying to get his attention without giving him any of hers.

The second option was irritating, the first was downright upsetting.

By the third day without her, he was trying to figure out how he felt about all of this.

It was as though he hadn't really had an opportunity to think about it. The whole Bella... thing.

On thursday afternoon his chances with her had gone from zero to _Holy crap I am fucking Bella Swan on the giraffe this is the greatest day of my life_ in the space of a half-hour.

And then she'd been such a bitch about it and he'd been so angry.

But he'd known, even in his anger, that he was never going to not be her friend. He'd known he was never going to let her not be his friend.

And since she'd only been going to be in town for two more precious weeks, he'd decided to fast-track the getting over it process and just get her to come over and everything would be like old times...

Except he left a message and she didn't call back. And even if she had, even if she'd come over, Jacob knew, now that he'd had time to think about it, to figure out how he felt about all of this, how he felt about the whole Bella thing, he knew that it wouldn't have been like old times.

Three more days passed and he couldn't keep it to himself anymore. He told Quil and Embry what had happened, and when he got to the part where he'd called the next morning and asked her to come over to hang out, Quil said he couldn't decide whether that made him insanely hard or insanely whipped.

Embry looked up from the comics section of the Saturday paper from three weeks ago, the vestige of a wry smile on his face. "Or just as in love with her as you were when you were fifteen," he said.

Quil laughed heartily at the memory. "Oh man, that was bad," he said, shaking his head. "When you were going to ask her to her _own prom,_ and you like, wrote that speech about it. Like you actually had friggin' palm cards with 'just as friends' written on them..."

Jacob rolled his eyes. It's not like he'd actually been going to _hold_ the palm cards. He'd spent hours wrote-learning some of his very best work and then...

"... and then it turned out she was already going to her own prom and she was going with the guy she'd been dating for like a _year._"

"Three months," Jacob corrected haughtily.

"Whatever, dude." Quil swung his arm in a dismissive gesture. "I just remembered you cancelled the date with, like, Shania Twain's younger sister with better tits. You are officially _not_ Don Juan. You _are_ officially _whipped._"

"Shut it, Quil," Embry said, his eyes still firmly on his comics, wry smile blooming because really, he tried to be good cop, but that didn't mean he didn't have a sense of humor, and come on, there was no way he could resist this. "He's not _whipped._ He's just - " he lifted one hand to make air-quotes " - 'the classy type' now."

Jacob shook his head, grinned despite himself.

"Assholes," he said. "Both of you."

Then he turned, tuned out the banter that followed, stared his hands and knew.

Embry was right. He was just as in love with Bella Swan as he had been at the age of fifteen. The only difference was that it really wasn't cute anymore.

Other than that it was exactly the same.

And right now it was fucking awful.

***

It was a quarter to eleven on Saturday night and Bella's flight back to New Hampshire was leaving the next morning.

She was doing the dishes and crying so fiercely that Charlie could hear it in the next room.

He pressed his palm to his forehead and thought _Damn paper-thin walls,_ because there was no way around it now, he was going to have to ask her what was wrong, and even if he loved his daughter, even if sometimes he loved the absurd idea of actually being able to make things better, he knew that he would get it all wrong, and that at some point she would say he wasn't sensitive enough or he wasn't smart enough or he didn't earn enough money and this house didn't feel like home anymore and she was sorry, but she'd taken a teaching job in Arizona and...

He shook his head, shushed his subconscious, tried to focus on the game.

"Something's going on with her and Jake," Billy said as he reached down and fished another can of Vitamin R out of the bag next to his chair, cracked it open, his eyes never leaving the screen.

"Oh?" Charlie said, or asked, he supposed.

"Yep. She hasn't been over to the house for at least... ten days. Maybe longer. I asked Jake about it the other day but he's saying nothing."

"Oh."

For a while that seemed to be that, and as the Mariners went longer and longer without scoring, the sobs Bella thought would surely be drowned out by running water and clinking dishes quieted to sniffles.

But then Billy smiled to himself, turned to Charlie and said "Kid's miserable."

Charlie frowned. "Which one?"

"Both, I think," Billy said. He lifted his beer to his lips, then hesitated. "Hey, do you think you could maybe lock the doors and hang a right on your way to the airport tomorrow? Make her come say goodbye?"

Charlie grimaced, scratched at the folds in his forehead, smoothed his mustache. "You think that's a good idea?"

Billy shrugged, but then he smiled knowingly, said that that way Jacob could do all the talking himself.

***

The next day. The last day.

Bella and Jacob were walking along a small, dim path in the forest surrounding the Black house and Bella was thinking it was ironic because the house wasn't black at all, it was red mostly, but an actual black house would be awful in hot weather and anyway it would look kind of creepy and -

"So it was nice of Charlie to force you to come see me."

"He didn't..." Bella started quickly, stopped. "He told you that?"

"Nope. But I figured if you actually wanted to see me, you probably would have wanted to return my call at some point in the past two weeks."

Bella kept walking, and said "What? You didn't call..." even though very quickly she was sure that he had, because very quickly she was remembering how she had thought it was uncharacteristically rude of Charlie to yell out that the bacon was cold when she'd gone to the trouble of cooking breakfast...

She pressed her lips together. She felt like she was going to start crying any minute now and she had to hold on really tight.

Jacob smiled to himself, shook his head, said in the same way some people sigh "As if I wouldn't call," and when Bella just looked away uncomfortably, her lips still pursed like this new information meant absolutely nothing to her, he added in a very drawn-out and unpleasant way "I always call after."

Bella's lungs were steel bands and they were inside out around her ribs. She mouthed the word 'Right' and it would have been scathing if it had made a sound, she was sure.

It was a horrible moment. Really horrible. And Jacob was busy trying to think of a good comeback to her silence when he realized this was a load of crap.

This was a load of crap because they didn't do _this,_ the whole bullshit passive aggressive mind-games thing. Or maybe Bella did, and good for her, but Jacob sure as hell didn't and he was going to put a stop to it right now.

"Okay," he said. "Clearly you're upset with me and that's fine, but you at least have to tell me why. Because I don't get it. From where I'm standing all I did was what you wanted. I just... did what you asked me to do, and okay so maybe coincidentally it was also - "

Bella didn't let him finish that thought. While he'd been speaking she'd been rolling her eyes and folding her arms and looking away and she interrupted him with "Right, and I'm supposed to feel special because you'll screw anything that moves."

Jacob raised an eyebrow, and when he stepped toward her, she turned her head a little further to the side.

"You are special," he said, like it was a matter of fact. "And yeah, I'll screw anything that moves, sure, why not. And you can stop trying to make me feel bad about that because it's not gonna happen, but at the same time, Bella, if you don't... I mean if you think I shouldn't be doing that... I guess you should say so, because... well maybe I shouldn't... and..."

Jacob frowned, because he'd completely lost his momentum and he didn't know how to say what he wanted to say except by just saying it, and that had been the plan when he'd started talking, but now it was too late because Bella had snapped "Since when am I your super-ego?"

He shook his head. "My super-what?"

"Your super - " Bella groaned, almost stomped her foot. (She was glad that she didn't, because Jacob probably would have laughed and that would have been the last damn straw and she would have wound up screaming _Everything!!!!!!!_ at him like some kind of crazy person.) "It's like your - " she caught herself, nixed 'mom' at the last moment and landed awkwardly and obviously on "... parent," ran the rest of her words together in a garbled mess: "Or your teacher or it's just this voice in your head that tells you what you should do or something _whatever._"

Jacob leaned back slightly, then forward, peered at her thoughtfully while she tried to breathe in a casual way, like she hadn't just... basically screamed everything at him like some kind of crazy person.

"You're not my mom," he said after a moment. "I don't want you to be. It would be kind of funny if you _tried_ to be, since you would have had to have been, like, barely verbal when you gave birth to me."

Bella attempted a smile. It was more of a squiggle, but Jacob took it anyway and he said "So you're definitely not my mom, just so we're clear."

Bella squiggled again and Jacob took it again, and he stepped closer and added so very easily "But you could be my girlfriend if you wanted to be."

Bella laughed.

She fucking _laughed_, and Jacob decided he was out of good will for the day. He said "Fine. Laugh. Go back to Dartmouth and laugh at me all you want. I'm done," and proceeded to walk away at a brisk pace.

Bella caught up with him though, with a flurry of apologies and a sincere "I didn't mean to be rude" that just made Jacob want to walk at a pace that was even brisker.

"Jake wait - I'm really - " Bella was cut off both times by Charlie yelling that they were going to be late. "Please wait. I didn't mean to laugh, it's just this whole thing is kind of crazy, right?"

Jacob had stopped by this time. He turned and said flatly "Right. Crazy. Charlie's waiting. I'll see you at Christmas."

Then he was walking again and Charlie was yelling and Bella was panicking because she'd decided in the last 0.23 seconds that she really, _really_ wanted to be Jacob's girlfriend and if she didn't say something right now she might never -

"I can't wait till Christmas. I can't." Bella grabbed hold of Jacob's arm and _pulled,_ looked down at her fingers wrapped possessively around it at the same moment he did. "It was bad enough before, and you took weeks to return my emails sometimes, you lazy jerk."

Bella was still staring at her skin on his, she didn't see it when he smiled sheepishly and opened his mouth with a ready excuse.

"And I missed you so much..." she continued, before he could make a sound. "Because you're my friend and of course I would miss you and it was okay but now..." she shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut and swore to herself that when she opened them again she'd have the guts to look at him. "Two weeks, that's all. Two weeks without being around you and it was like I was going to go _crazy._ Seriously, it was _messed up._ Like... I'd be sitting there doing nothing, and I'd think about how I wasn't sitting there doing nothing with you right at that moment and my whole body would just..." She opened her eyes. "... ache... and..."

She looked up, true to her word, and saw that Jacob was looking back down at her like he was really... pleased?

And he said "You're in love with me."

And Bella said "Yes."

They looked at each other after that, and it was a nice moment.

It was nice.

And Jacob said, with the barest hint of a smirk "That's nice. That's nice to know", turned, started walking away...

He was _walking away from her._

Bella's mouth fell open because _Seriously what is this? Yet another teen version of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses? Abby would _not_ be impressed._

Jacob only took enough steps for her to form that thought before he ran back to her, and then he was spluttering with laughter and she was a foot off the ground and Charlie was yelling again and Bella was squeaking out "You bitch! You little bitch!"

When he set her down they were close and clinging and recovering breathlessly from hilarity and indignation and it was the perfect moment for -

"_Isabella Swan!_ This driver speeds for no man. You have five seconds to get up here. One. Two..."

They looked at each other and laughed like Charlie was the funniest guy in the world.

And then, barely a breath later they were quiet again, almost solemn. For just a couple of seconds they looked at each other without humor, and Bella hoped she would always be able to picture Jacob looking at her like this, just like this, like this was no joke, this was not just-a-crush, this was not casual, like they were in love, really, truly in love, and if he had any say in the matter, they always would be.

She smiled suddenly, and at the exact same moment Charlie yelled a very belated "FOUR!"

Jacob smiled too.

He took her hand and they ran through the thinning trees and up the bare slope toward the house.

***

"Hey Charlie. Hey dad. Bella's my girlfriend now."

That was what Jacob said when they reached the cruiser and Bella's eyes widened because somehow it almost seemed... rude, like he should have built up to it with pleasantries or something, and when she said as much he squeezed her fingers and rolled his eyes and said "Well _maybe_ if someone hadn't wasted two whole weeks pining after me from afar..."

Meanwhile Charlie frowned, scratched his forehead, smoothed his mustache. Billy grinned and made what Bella sincerely hoped was a joke about putting an announcement in the local paper.

And then she saw that the passenger side door was open already and her stomach tightened, her chest pulled itself close against her heart.

Jacob squeezed her fingers again, and she asked, softly enough that only he would hear it, "Do girlfriends get their emails replied to in a timely fashion?"

Jacob smiled. "I think so. Probably. Depends what they write. Put something saucy in the subject line and I'm sure I'll - "

"Oh my God, Jacob. I am not going to write you dirty emails."

"You never know... What about when you miss me so much your whole body - "

"_Shut up!"_

Bella kicked Jacob's foot, glanced behind her at her dad who was leaning against the cruiser and looking the other way, at Billy, who as far as she could just barely make out was telling him to stop by on the way back from the airport and they'd cook up the fish they'd caught last weekend.

Her stomach tightened again, and she yearned for Billy Black's fish-fry in a way nobody should ever yearn for things like fish-fry.

"I have to go," she said mournfully and when Jacob said "I know," she let go of his hand and headed toward the car, shoulders slumped and heart aching.

"What the hell?" Jake protested, grabbing her hand again and pulling her back to him. "Don't I at least get to kiss you?"

Bella bit her lip, glanced behind her at Billy and Charlie again. "Now?" she whispered.

Jacob sighed like he was exasperated, when really he was just greatly entertained.

"Hey dad!" he yelled out. "Charlie! Hey!" And then, when he had their attention, "Can you guys turn around for a sec? My girlfriend is kind of shy."

Charlie rolled his eyes, jingled his keys. Billy laughed. But they both obeyed, and when their gazes were properly averted, Jacob took a step forward, tugged on Bella's hand so she would take one too.

Then he let go of her hand, placed one of his at her waist and the other at her cheek, just like you're supposed to, and leaned in, just like you're supposed to, except he had to more lean _down,_ because Bella really was pretty short and he had gotten kind of tall, so in the end everything was by the book except that his knees were bent and his neck was stretched as far as it would go, and Bella stood still and felt irrationally nervous, like they hadn't already skipped first base, and second base, and third, and...

She stood still until Jacob's lips touched hers, and then she reached up, clutched at his shirt, opened her mouth and arched her back and sighed against his teeth and his tongue.

It was lovely and warm and Bella's thighs shook, Jacob's heart beat so hard it hurt.

It was lovely and warm and it went on too long and when Jacob heard Charlie jingling his keys again, he drew back, breathed out, smiled, closed his eyes, kissed Bella's cheek about as slowly as you can reasonably kiss someone's cheek.

"Christmas?" she said.

"Christmas," he agreed.

And then she was gone.

***

Bella had the most awkward car ride of her life.

Jacob high-fived Billy, went inside and locked himself in the bathroom for twenty-five minutes.

***

It wasn't Christmas. It was eight days later, and Bella was supposed to be in class but she wasn't. She wasn't anywhere near class. She was in a small motel room in a small motel in a small town somewhere between Hanover and La Push, and she was in bed and she was naked and she was with Jacob and he was breathing hard and touching her face softly and saying "_That_ should have been our first time."

"Yeah, about that," Bella said, pulling strands of what she was pretty sure was actually Jake's hair out of her mouth, "Giraffe-sex is great and all, but why exactly did we not just use the couch?"

Jacob's brow furrowed. "I... have no idea."

Bella eyed him suspiciously, waited a beat, and sure enough his mouth twitched and he smiled and averted his eyes.

Bella shook her head in disbelief. "_Jacob Black!_ I know you love cars and all, but _really._ We are not doing that again. Nope. It's all beds from here on out."

"Jeez, Quit raining on my parade, Bells. You know, I've been thinking about buying a motorcycle and..."

"Beds, beds, beds!" Bella insisted, and she looked so cute when she did it that Jacob had to kiss her again... and again... and many more times after that until he was breathless and crazy for her and saying "I love you. Oh God I fucking love you so much. I've been in love with you since about five minutes after you came back to town. Bells, I've been in love with you since I was a _virgin._ Since before my first real _kiss_ even. How sad is that?"

Bella laughed and kissed him three times in quick succession. "Aw, I dunno. I think it's sort of beautiful. Did you ever steal Embry's guitar and write bad songs? Oh my God, I bet you wrote bad songs for me. How _cute._" She sighed dramatically. "And I just saw you as nothing more than a kid brother."

"Oh please, you were all over me from day one."

Bella opened her eyes wide in a playful expression of shock. "Jacob you were a child. I am not a pedophile."

Jacob snorted at child, retaliated with "Sure, sure. I just seem to remember a lot of unnecessary hand-holding back when I was jailbait is all."

"Hand-ho - " Bella gasped out. "_You_ were the one who... And come on, _hand-holding?!_"

She scrambled onto her knees under the sheets and straddled Jacob, shutting him up just as he'd started with "All I'm saying is...", pressed her hands to his shoulders, leaned forward, noticed sweetly the way her hair streamed down into his when she said "I was _not_ all over you!"

She stared down at him, all outrage. Seconds passed in which he breathed and she waited for a retraction. But she was unable to keep her lips pursed when his pulled into a slow grin, when he said, with a smugness she figured he'd just earned, "Well... You are now."

Bella laughed. She laughed and she said "Yes I am," and she fell forward onto Jacob, heavy and fast.

He groaned, told her to watch it, he wasn't made of stone, chuckled when she came back with 'You wouldn't make such a comfy mattress if you were', stroked her hair away from her shoulder, kissed it, rested his hands in the shallow hollows of her waist.

"It's sort of true, though. I always wanted you."

Jacob didn't catch any of either sentence. They were barely audible, all closed-mouthed and muffled at his neck, and besides, he was busy tracing patterns on Bella's right hip with his pinky and thinking _So soft. I like girls. I love Bella Swan._

"Hmm?" he inquired, when he realized she'd attempted to speak.

Bella shrugged against his body and Jacob seemed to understand it.

He went back to his patterns and she thought for a while about what she wanted to say.

She wasn't going to repeat what she'd just said, because really, it would only end in more pedo-gags and she was past that.

She was in a different place entirely. She was in a very serious, very romantic and therefore very dangerous place.

She wanted to say things. Cheesy things that Jacob would never, ever let her forget.

She felt her face flush at the thought of speaking what she was thinking right now, something like:

_I always wanted to be around you, because you made things lighter and warmer for me, you know? I thought I'd left the sun behind in Phoenix, but then I found you and you were like my own personal - _

No. That little speech would be accompanying her, and _only_ her, to her grave.

But there was something else she could say, something that was gathering swiftly and simply inside her, and it was still sort of cheesy, maybe, but it was better than the sun speech, and maybe if she said it just right it would _be_ just right, maybe it would be _just right_ and Jacob wouldn't laugh...

"I feel so lucky that I got to fall in love like this, with someone who's only ever had to exist to make me happy."

There. She'd said it nice and smoothly and all in one go, and Jacob wasn't laughing, so she silently declared it a job well done.

But the longer Jacob wasn't laughing, the longer he just stared at her, the hotter Bella's face felt, and she began, falteringly, to explain herself. "I just... I meant that you... you're kind of like the su - "

_Saved!_

Jacob was kissing her before the offending metaphor could quite slip out. Bella smiled, and when she did, Jacob smiled too, and as their lips curved away from each other their eyes met.

Bella made a sound like _hmm,_ blinked in a way that was almost sleepy. She lay back, lifted her arms above her head till they touched the wall, said again "_Hmm,_" and then "Where was I?"

Jacob sat up and frowned, pretended to think back to something that may or may not have happened a million years ago. "Not sure. You were saying something really cute about how awesome I am. Now let's see..."

He shifted onto his hands and knees and began to crawl from the foot of the bed toward her, and his eyes were dark and too alert, and the muscles in his shoulders rolled like -

_Panther!_ Bella thought gleefully. _Sex Panther. That's what I'll call the next -_

"_Ahh._ I remember," Jacob said finally, and he lowered his lashes to her stomach, followed his hand as it travelled down, spoke on with it. "It was something about..." He paused, then dipped low, watched as Bella's mouth fell open, as her eyes closed quickly, smiled. "... _Yeah,_ that's it."

His smile slid into a grin.

"It was something about me making you _happy._"


End file.
